Case Study: StorageCraft and ABS

Case Study: StorageCraft and ABS

A s a StorageCraft® OEM partner, Advanced Backup Solutions (ABS) offers a best-of-breed business continuity solution that delivers enterprise-class data protection and disaster recovery to managed service providers (MSPs) who work with small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Built on leading technologies, ABS Enterprise® is a complete solution with integrated onsite/offsite backup and restore, plus virtual failover for true business continuity.

The Massachusetts-based company uses its unique perspective to serve partners and customers across all industries who have one thing in common: the desire for enterprise-class data protection and disaster recovery.
Founded in 2005, ABS is a partner-driven company that enables managed service providers to deliver business continuity as a service. The ABS Enterprise business continuity platform—now integrated with StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® software—provides MSPs with a complete solution that is scalable and easy to deploy and manage, while delivering cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery for their customers.

ABS partners can offer a variety of business continuity services, including the following:

This diverse portfolio gives ABS partners the flexibility to satisfy different customer needs and budgets.

This case study highlights two recent disasters that demonstrate why a growing number of MSPs are using StorageCraft solutions through the ABS Continuity Partner Program. In the following pages, you’ll see how StorageCraft is helping to power the ABS Enterprise solution and keep businesses running, no matter what.

Case Study: StorageCraft and ABS (531.5 KiB, 724 downloads)

Decian

An ABS partner for three years, Decian has been delivering a variety of IT solutions to small and mid-sized business (SMB) customers in Connecticut for 15 years, including help desk, network support, business continuity, and other managed services.

Kyle Hair, founder of Decian, describes his partnership with ABS like this:

It has reduced our liability to our customers, increased our customer uptime and happiness, and made it easier to support our customers. ABS is an extension of our sales team and our support team.

Customer Profile

A government contractor that is very concerned about data protection and that requires zero downtime. According to Kyle,

This kind of customer wants their data replicated offsite and wants assurances on the security and encryption levels of the data—in the appliance, during transit, and in the data center.

Business Continuity Solution

ABS Enterprise with Enhanced DR, includes replication to geographically diverse data storage facilities (California and Massachusetts), with onsite and offsite host virtualization. In addition, an ABS Continuity Appliance® located onsite supports 3TB of customer data and up to six machines running simultaneously in a virtual instance.

Incident

The customer lost a blade in their IBM blade center. The blade was running VMware vCenter, controlling their entire server farm. Here’s what Kyle says about it:

We were able to start the vCenter server on the ABS Continuity Appliance and continue operations as normal. The customer wasn’t aware they’d lost a blade until we contacted them. Less than an hour from when we got the alert that the server was down, we spun up the machine running on that blade to the appliance. Nothing skipped a beat.

Three weeks later, when the new hardware arrived, Decian restored the customer’s vCenter from the appliance to the new blade. Again, the process took less than an hour.

Without ABS, the customer would’ve been down for three weeks, waiting for a server blade replacement from IBM. All of the VMware vCenter features and management capabilities would have been completely disabled—essentially leaving all of the servers unmanaged.

RMON

Founded in 2002, RMON Networks has also been an ABS partner since 2010. Based in New Hampshire, RMON Networks specializes in IT services for the SMB market and in helping customers leverage the cloud for hardware, software, and backup as a service.

Tim Howard, president of RMON Networks, says the ABS Continuity Partner Program fits his company’s business model:

Every business is different. Some have different compliance and security requirements, some have different recovery time objectives (RTOs). Helping customers find the right solutions—really listening to them—that’s where we shine. The ABS solution is scalable, so we can use it with customers of all kinds.

Customer Profile

A utilities company in Massachusetts. Tim describes them like this:

The company was in the process of upgrading their entire infrastructure and had planned to upgrade their computer hardware in a few months. Then the unexpected happened.

Business Continuity Solution

ABS Enterprise with Enhanced DR, includes replication to geographically diverse data storage facilities (California and Massachusetts), with onsite and offsite host virtualization. In addition, an ABS Continuity Appliance located onsite supports 6TB of customer data and up to 12 machines running simultaneously in a virtual instance.

Incident

A RAID controller and two drives in the RAID array failed. The customer lost their finance server, their client databases, and their accounting databases. Years of billing records were at risk.

We were able to run their finance server on the ABS Continuity Appliance, so no data was lost. We had them up and running in 15 minutes. Seeing the look on the customer’s face when the system came back up was priceless. We proved our value that day.

Since the company was planning to upgrade their hardware, RMON Networks continued running the finance server on the appliance for the next three months.

After the new hardware arrived, it was just like any normal migration. We restored the data to the new finance server over the weekend, and on Monday the employees didn’t realize the server was back on premise.

Delivering Immediate Value and Complete Business Continuity

Because threats to business data can occur any time, to any kind of business, in any location, ABS uses StorageCraft to enable its partners to respond accordingly.

The customer incidents above happened during clear weather conditions, without loss of power or damage to the premises. Though not as catastrophic as a hurricane or fire, the hardware failures could have been disastrous for the businesses involved.

Business continuity services from ABS, delivered by ABS partners and powered by StorageCraft, provide disaster resistance—the ability to completely avoid data disasters. That’s exactly why MSPs like Kyle and Tim partner with ABS. According to Kyle,

Our ABS partnership is greatly valued. Not only is the solution good for our customers, it’s very cost-effective. We’ve lost customers in the past by not using the ABS solution. Customers with ABS have no complaints. And, we get better sales and backend support with ABS.

For Tim, the ability to offer redundancy and offsite replication to his customers was as crucial as their data security:

We’ve worked with ABS to assure customers of the safety of their data, meeting whatever compliance requirements they have. I’ve seen the ABS data center. Getting to know the people at ABS and seeing their facility were factors in our decision to partner with them.

With data centers on both U.S. coasts, ABS offers a complete business continuity solution that delivers immediate value. Partners can protect customers from big disasters and the more common incidents of equipment failure, viruses, security breaches, and human error. Because ABS solutions run on StorageCraft software, they offer scalability, efficient management of data growth, and increased reliability.

About Advanced Backup Solutions

Distributed by a network of certified partners, ABS uses leading technologies such as StorageCraft ShadowProtect for solutions that are easy to deploy and manage.

ABS offers a full range of partner-managed solutions for data protection and disaster recovery. Whether seeking a complete business continuity solution, aligning for regulatory compliance, or simply protecting user data, ABS has a solution. The ABS Continuity Partner Program includes proactive technical support, solution training, best practice resources, sales support, and assistance in disaster recovery situations.

Powered by StorageCraft ShadowProtect software, ABS has set a new standard with its offsite disaster recovery product offering. The lineup includes per incidence services allowing recovery points to be virtualized and hosted, but goes further with innovative high availability solutions including a hybrid firewall and dedicated compute node to assure instant DR availability.

Andy Cote, Director of Channel Sales, elaborates:

In addition to the actual business continuity platform, our engineers are a safety net for our service providers, providing regular monitoring and maintenance of the ABS Continuity Appliance, as a second set of eyes and support for our partners.

The ABS DR infrastructure is based on a highly-available, geo-redundant architecture. Data is transmitted and stored with the highest security protocols, including industry-leading 256-bit AES encryption. For an additional layer of protection, the ABS solution uses a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to establish a private communication path to the ABS offsite facilities.

ABS’ primary facility is located in Massachusetts while its secondary site is in California. The primary facility is uniquely co-owned by the company, enabling ABS to provide additional valued-added recovery services, which serve as key differentiators versus the industry standard.

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